Bill would boost efforts to retain tribal language (fwd)

[Andre Cramblit]

Bill would boost efforts to retain tribal language

Posted: January 31, 2006 by: The Associated Press
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412342

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) - The days in which Penobscot children were
admonished for speaking their native language in school are long gone.
But the Penobscots still need to do more to rebuild a language that was
nearly lost forever, a tribal lawmaker says.

Michael Sockalexis, who represents his tribe in the Legislature, has
introduced a bill that would add $300,000 to a Penobscot Language
Preservation Fund operated by the state Department of Education. The
money would be matched by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Many Penobscots know some words or phrases, but few are fluent. Precise
figures are hard to come by, but Sockalexis said there are only a
handful of ''traditional speakers'' among the tribe's more than 2,300
members, more than 1,000 of whom still live in Maine.

Sockalexis said he was part of the last generation to be immersed in the
Penobscot language at home. But even he is no longer fluent. ''I lost
it,'' he said.

With the language ''at a tipping point,'' the goal is to continue to
instill the language in the tribe's children and to turn it back into a
conversational language, he said.

The tribe, which has a reservation on Indian Island, is working hard to
do just that, using an after-school program that serves all students in
the K - 8 school, as well as an immersion summer camp at which students
speak nothing but Penobscot.

The state funding and the matching funds would allow the tribe to move
the language program back into the regular classroom, Sockalexis said.

Maine's four Indian tribes - the Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe,
Houlton Band of Maliseets and Aroostook Band of Micmacs - speak
languages that are closely related. Those tribes and the Abenakis
comprise what is known as the Wabanaki Confederacy.

Wayne Newell, a Passamaquoddy language coordinator and an authority on
all of Maine's tribal languages, said he prefers to speak
Passamaquoddy. ''When we were kids, that's all you spoke. That's all
you had. That's all you saw,'' he said.

Now, Newell said, children of all tribes are unlikely to become fluent
in their native languages, or to speak them at all, unless they learn
them at school.

The differences between English and Indian languages are much greater
than the difference between English and French or Spanish, he noted.

There are some English words that have no equivalent in Native
languages, or that translate very differently. There is no
Passamaquoddy word for ''wild,'' for example, because ''we have no
concept of it'' as Indians, Newell said.

Another difference is that verbs are more important than nouns in the
Passamaquoddy language. ''You can have a complete sentence in
Passamaquoddy with one word,'' Newell said.

Newell said efforts like those of Sockalexis are important because
language defines people.

''Whenever you lose a language, you lose more than just a language,'' he
said.

.:.

André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the  
Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council  
NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the  
development needs of American Indians

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